Collective Self-Awareness and Self-Expression for Efficient Network Exploration

Message broadcasting and topology discovery are classical problems for distributed systems, both of which are related to the concept of network exploration. Typical decentralized approaches assume that network nodes are provided with traditional routing tables. In this paper we propose a novel network exploration approach based on collective self-awareness and self-expression, resulting from the simultaneous application of two strategies, namely hierarchy and recursion, which imply the adoption of unusual routing tables. We show how the proposed approach may provide distributed systems with improved efficiency and scalability, with respect to traditional approaches.